Is this because your default approach is to horizontally scale or because you have tried other options? Logically scaling vertically a single server with pooled connections should have a better effect than horizontally scaling to multiple servers that need to share connections through a proxy. The proxy doesn't magically increase the number of connections available to the database. It will add overhead to all your database interactions though.

We're not necessarily talking about 50 pods for the same application, could also be a zoo of smaller low traffic applications sharing a Postgres instance.